G2 User Interface Team Update

Hi, all. I've been somewhat busy and haven't made a big announcement yet about this, but I'm planning on doing so on the front page pretty soon.

However in the meantime so that you guys know what's going on, here's the deal. I've appointed Ross Reyman the User Interface team lead for the G2 project. He's been working away on mockups for the new G2 interface and when he gets into full swing he's going to break down the user interface project into pieces that we can assign out to other user interface designers.

He'll be posting regularly into this forum with news and updates and generally coordinating the user interface effort. In the meantime, I encourage you guys to noodle around with UI ideas and post them here so that he can get an idea of your skill set and can collaborate with you.

There will be work for everybody! Stay tuned.

OK, Well I haven't been around on the net much recently, I've been very busy with my art work (http://qb45.tonez-online.com/home/pn/index.php?module=truebored&func=view&id=5447&base=yes show some examples for those who are nosey. I also wrote the forum on that page :D) , and now I've finished that, I have some time. I have exams for the next 3 weeks, however I only have 5 exams, and so I should have plenty of time for revision and UI design now. I'll try and stick around here a little more now.

In the next week or so I'll try and train my self up to get to know Smarty well. I'm also trying to get my self to learn the BlockLayout template system in Xaraya, along with everything else Xaraya based, so I'll be well culed up on all this theme business :P

Somthing was mentioned about the use of new container in (X)HTML. I am certainly agree that tables should get dropped soon. However, I still find that new browsers don't seem to be following the CSS 2 rules. There are still many bugs that make it hard to make designs using DIV/P/SPAN tags that work well of every browser if you plan to use things like the float attribute and some of the positioning stuff. This is one of the reasons why in my recent designs I still use tables quite a bit. However, I will use DIV and SPAN tags where possible, but somethings are still easier to do in tables for the moment due to the bugs in various browsers. As a result I think table based designs will still be about for a long time and suppoort for tables certainly won't get dropped overnight, and they do get rendered consistantly over all browsers. I guess this all depends on how the interface all works. DIV and SPAN tags certainly have many advantages over tables and if it wasn't for all the browser flaws I would certainly be using them a lot more in place of tables.

Anyway I guess the important thing is to how some vision on how the interface works as a structure rather than the underlaying technical side of coding it.

I'm not quite sure yet either, to be quite honest.

I've been hard at work coming up with mock-ups to get the ball rolling. I think once that part of the process is done, I will probably call upon anyone interested to start helping out by creating new themes, etc.

I'm trying to make the core layout/design easy to understand so new theme developers can jump in and start tweaking the layouts a bit.

When new developers come up with new layouts/ideas, it may help shape the core layout.

So, all I can say for right now is to stay tuned while we get the base (vanilla simple) theme done. From there I will need help with other elements/designs...

Ross